Besides listening to the guy tell you the milage and compression, what else can i check or look for, when looking for a good used engine?

 

first of all, run a carfax on his VIN. secondly, get his maintance schedule. lastly, test drive it urself.

 

well what should you look for on a junk yard engine?
one thats not in a car?

 

not much you can do... they're not gonna test it and do all kinds of crap considering they're selling it to you for $300 or so anyways...

 

What are the circumstances, do you actually want to install this motor into a Maxima without one? The general rule with such a case is that you go in willing to eat the labor to install and deinstall if anything is wrong, because the motor maybe be only $200-$500. In order to do so, you obviously have to have a shop and be pretty experienced with the labor.

Usually in a salvage all the seller is doing is warranting that it runs, or did when it came out. He will usually install heat tabs so that if you smoke the motor due to a cooling issue, it's your bad, not his.

You basically have the word of the seller that the motor ran when it came out of the original vehicle, nothing more. In something like a 4th gen Maxima, I would say it's not worth the while in many cases--we're talking about cars that have values ranging from 2 grand to 5500 tops, hardly worth putting a used motor in unless you have time on your hands.